Nan Li

Utrecht University

Department of Information and Computing Sciences

I am a PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing in the Natural Language Processing group at Utrecht University, advised by Prof. Massimo Poesio and Prof. Albert Gatt.

My research takes a perspectivist view of meaning: interpretation depends on the information and perspectives available to each interlocutor. I am broadly interested in dialogue, grounding, and how language and vision-language models represent meaning variation.

My work is part of DeMeVa and is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through the AiNed Fellowship Grant. I hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computational Linguistics, both from Peking University, under the supervision of Prof. Weidong Zhan. I also interned at the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University, working with Prof. Zhifang Sui.

news

Jul 25, 2026	I will present Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue at SIGDIAL 2026, Emory University, Atlanta, 3–5 August. My talk is in Oral Session 5 on 5 August. Come say hello if you are there.
Jul 20, 2026	Next month I will be in Prague for HLV-DP (Human Label Variation in Discourse and Pragmatic phenomena) at ESSLLI 2026, 10–14 August, giving a long talk on 12 August: Personal Interpretations as Pragmatic Label Variation: Perspectivist Grounding Annotation and (V)LLM Evaluation.
Jun 01, 2026	Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue has been accepted to SIGDIAL 2026 as an oral presentation.
May 14, 2026	I presented Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask at LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca.
Feb 13, 2026	Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask has been accepted to LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca.
Nov 08, 2025	I presented our team submission DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025 as a poster at the 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives), co-located with EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou.

selected publications

Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric DialogueOral

Nan Li, Albert Gatt, and Massimo Poesio

In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), Aug 2026

Bib ACL Anthology arXiv PDF GitHub Hugging Face

@inproceedings{li2026seeing,
  title = {Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue},
  author = {Li, Nan and Gatt, Albert and Poesio, Massimo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)},
  pages = {694--710},
  month = aug,
  year = {2026},
  address = {Atlanta, Georgia, USA},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
}

Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTaskOral

Nan Li, Albert Gatt, and Massimo Poesio

In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), May 2026

Bib LREC arXiv PDF GitHub Hugging Face

@inproceedings{li2026grounded,
  title = {Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask},
  author = {Li, Nan and Gatt, Albert and Poesio, Massimo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)},
  pages = {4988--5001},
  month = may,
  year = {2026},
  address = {Palma, Mallorca, Spain},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  doi = {10.63317/59anbt78wyj7},
}

DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning

Daniil Ignatev, Nan Li, Hugh Mee Wong, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives), Nov 2025

Bib ACL Anthology arXiv PDF

@inproceedings{ignatev2025demeva,
  title = {DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning},
  author = {Ignatev, Daniil and Li, Nan and Wong, Hugh Mee and Dang, Anh and Yaschuk, Shane Kaszefski},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives)},
  pages = {171--181},
  month = nov,
  year = {2025},
  address = {Suzhou, China},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.nlperspectives-1.15},
}